On advice from a previous thread about extracting trim from my t4 twister, I purchased a pollen sifter/tumbler. WOW! I have almost 2 quarts of kief.
What do I do with it?
Blast it? I've heard that can be dangerous because kief is so dense.
Rosin? I dont own a press.
Alcohol extraction seems like my best bet? Any idea what the finished product will be like? I've done alcohol extractions with bud and the end product is always black and sticky.
We extracted kif in a closed loop LPG system using a lightly packed 12" column, top only flood through a showerhead, and packed coffee filters below sitting on a 150 mesh screen. If you don't have the correct equipment for LPG extraction, then ethanol would be a good choice.
If you smear a black ethanol extraction on white paper, you will see that it actually extremely dark green from chlorophyll pickup. If you have done a good job tumbling, there will be very little green plant fragments present to supply that chlorophyll.
As far as sticky, it depends on how much of the alcohol and water is left in the mixture. Most of the alcohol evaporates away easily, but once you reach an 95.5% azeotropic mixture, the remaining 0.5% alcohol and water are more difficult to remove.
Extracting dry sieve kif instead of plant material should reduce your moisture pickup to that present in the alcohol, or about 5%.
You can use 200 proof or remove that 5% water before extracting with the 190 proof, using Drierite.
You can also use 99% Isopropyl, which reduces the water issue but any residual left in your extract is less salubrious. FDA standards for Iso (Propylene 2) is 5000 ppm, which you can easily taste at less than 10% of that level. If you can no longer taste its sweetness, it should be safe.
If you extract the kif using alcohol that is at least -18C/0F, you won't pick up any more water from the kif, and it will reduce the pickup of molecules longer than about C-22, which in the case of kif is any trash plant matter present and waxes from the trichome caps'.
An easy way to drop the alcohol temperature below -50C is to add dry ice. Keep the solution cold after extraction and when you filter the solution after extraction, the fats and lipids will be left on the filter. Easier to do with a vacuum filtration system.
If you want it stiff, you need to keep it in its natural carboxylic acid state (THC-a), by keeping recovery heat at a minimum. Decarboxylation removes a carbon, two oxygens, and a hydrogen link (COOH) from the THC-a molecule, which lowers its melt point and makes it more pliable.
Decarboxylation happens naturally over time, we just speed it up with heat. One easy way to use less heat evaporating away the alcohol and water, is to pour the solution in a thin film in a shallow dish and protect with a dust cover that allows free air circulation. You can speed it up with a fan, but you lose dust protection and the alcohol will pickup more water from atmospheric humidity.
Towards the end, you will have mostly beige water alcohol left, with the resin having separated and sunk to the bottom. At that point, a quick way to get rid of that watery solution, is stick the shallow dish in the freezer to firm up the resin, but not to freeze the water alcohol solution. At that point you can pour off/blot/syringe off most of the remaining liquid. Letting it sit out with a dust porous cover will allow enough of the rest to evaporate away so as to stiffen into shatter over time, although you can dab with it at any point along the way.
You can also remove most of the alcohol using a rotovap and the remaining in a vacuum oven, so as to lower the the boiling points of the remaining azeotropic water/alcohol, so that any decarboxylation is still at a slow rate. Spread it in a thin film to get maximum surface area and place in a preheated 125F oven. When it has fully melted, start vacuuming down the oven and when the boiling becomes too violent, hold at that vacuum level until it calms down, and then continue pulling down until you reach 10,000 microns/-29.5 HG vacuum levels and hold until there are no large bubbles, only small fizzy CO2 bubbles around the edges.
Remove and let cool.
